Dance to Your Daddy

The manager shrugged.

'It was none of my business,' he repeated.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

HORNPIPE-THE BOAT COMES HOME

Tell him there is measure in everything, and so dance out the answer.'

Much Ado About Nothing.

(1)

'But how did you tumble to it, ma'am?' asked Kirkby, when they were on their way home, having dined and spent the night at the hotel. 'It's very rich, I must say-almost Gilbertian, in fact-both Mr Romilly and Miss Lestrange being impostors and each taking the other for the genuine article. What put you on the trail?'

'Laura's unaccountable dislike of Rosamund, whom, I suppose, we had better call Dora or Trilby, the girl's own posing and play-acting, and, above all, the murder of Willoughby.'

'You mean she murdered him?'

'Well, someone did, and, so far as we know, she was the only person with a motive.'

'I see that now, ma'am, but you seem to have seen it all along.'

'By no means. It did not dawn on me until it was clear that Mr de Maas could not be Romilly Lestrange. When, however, I realised that not one of my younger relatives was able to expose him for the impostor that he was, I began to wonder why, on the two occasions on which he held a house-party, the same two young men were not invited. Hubert, of course, on both occasions, must have been abroad, but that did not apply to Willoughby.

'At the house-warming I understand that Dora made an issue of it, and insisted that neither brother was to be invited. The maid Amabel told me that there had been a quarrel and that the girl had tried to run away. On the second occasion Romilly seems to have put his foot down, obtained their addresses from her, and added them to his list of guests. He wanted to be sure that all the younger members regarded him as their uncle. As, of course, Willoughby would have been in a position to expose Dora as soon as he saw her, she abstracted the two letters from the pile before Luke took them down to the post-box, not realising that he had already counted the envelopes and read their superscriptions.

'Well, with Dora it was in for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose. She wrote her own letter to Willoughby, and arranged to meet him. What she said in it we shall probably never know for certain (although I can guess) but, whatever it was, it was sufficiently threatening or persuasive to bring him to this part of the world. Realising that so long as he was alive her impersonation of Rosamund was a source of danger to herself, she met him, treacherously stabbed him to death and rolled the body down the cliff at or near Dancing Ledge.'

'We'll have a job proving it, ma'am.'

'I know, but I found bloodstains on her coat, and she would have known of the sword which was found. It had been used to cut the cake. I accept the cook's evidence as to that. She purloined it...'

'How did she manage to stab him with it, though? He was a tall young fellow and she's only a slip of a thing.'

'I think she stood at the foot of the steepest and most tricky part of the descent-you will know the bit I mean-called to him, and then, as he came bounding and sliding, in the usual careless, young-man sort of fashion, down the sharp and awkward slope, she picked up the sword from where she had hidden it in the grass, and spitted him on it,' said Laura. 'That's what I should have done.'

'Taking a big chance, Mrs Gavin,' said Kirkby critically. 'Suppose it had only grazed him, or bounced off a rib or something?'

'Well, the plain fact is that it didn't,' said Laura. 'Then, I suppose, she put her foot on the corpse-he'd have fallen backwards, most likely, if that's the way it was done, because of the force with which he was careering downhill-pulled out the sword, wiped it clean, got the corpse to the edge of the cliff and tumbled it over, leaving the sword in the grass, where Romilly (de Maas) found it.'

'Yes,' said Kirkby doubtfully, 'but we spoke to the people at the farm and they had seen nobody.'

'The chances are that there was nobody to see, because you can reach Dancing Ledge without going through the farmyard at all, so long as you don't mind a long cast round. You can reach the coast by various tracks over those hills,' argued Laura. Kirkby turned to Dame Beatrice.

'What I'd really like to know, ma'am, is what took Mr de Maas and Miss Judith there, the day they found the sword,' he said.

'Maybe nothing but chance, you know,' said Dame Beatrice. 'And, in spite of Laura's dramatic reconstruction of the event, I doubt very much whether it was the sword which killed Willoughby. I think he would have seen a thing that size in time to avoid it. I think Dora left it there as a blind, knowing perfectly well that if it was traced to anybody it would be traced to de Maas, as, of course, it was. Besides, although I greatly admire Laura's spirited picture of Willoughby galloping down the hill and spitting himself on the sword, I cannot help realising that, from the spot Laura means, to get to the edge of the cliff would involve a considerable effort if one were burdened with the corpse of a man considerably taller and heavier than oneself.'

'What is your theory, then, ma'am? I see the difficulty of accepting Mrs Gavin's reconstruction. What is yours?'

'Oh, I feel certain that they met on the cliff-top itself. No other theory is half as likely.'

'But what argument could she have used to persuade him to meet her there? It's a wild and desolate spot in mid-February.'

'He may not have known that until he got there. I think she probably wrote him to the effect that she was in durance vile and in fear of her life, and that old Felix Napoleon had given her a considerable sum of money before he died instead of mentioning her in his will. I think she may have told him that she was willing to share her gains with him in return for his help in getting free from Romilly, as she would have called him. She does not know, even now, that he is Groot de Maas.'